A Trail of Candy

Sunday, May 8, 2011

Judas had not slept for days. The loss of his best friend troubled him deeply and he could not help but feel somewhat responsible for the tragedy that was continuing to unfold. Tears had eroded deep cracks into his cheeks and his disposition was more beastly than human. He sat at a large table with his cohorts, gulping wine and writing a memoir about the events of weeks past. He thought about the last time his friend had broken bread with them at this very table. Every thought fuelled his misery.

“John!“ Judas demanded. “Let me see what you’ve written about that long sermon our friend gave from the mount.”

Judas started rifling though John’s papyrus scrolls without waiting for acknowledgment or permission. John looked entirely dumbfounded as Judas hurriedly looked at one scroll and then another. He looked at John scornfully and then turned to the scrolls again. His impatience grew and he became aggravated like a man who had lost something that he knew he had just set down a moment ago. Unable to find what he was looking for, threw the scrolls haphazardly back down on the table.

“Where is it?” He demanded again of John.

John shrugged.

“Do you know what you are?” Judas asked. “You’re a douche. Did anyone think to write anything about our dear friend’s sermon… anyone?”

Luke bowed his head. “I really couldn’t hear much from where I was seated, but I think I’ve got most of it from the previous sermon,” he said.

Judas grimaced. He looked at Mark and snatched up a blotched up inky piece of papyrus from a pile scattered in front of him. Waving around the fluttering piece he cried, “Mark, you’ve hardly written anything! There’s barely enough in this chapter to roll into a scroll.”

Mark hoarded the rest of his small bits of writing together into his arms to protect them from any more of Judas’s spirited taunts.

“I guess we should be thankful that you can write at all,” Judas quipped at him.

Judas looked upward, almost hopefully, but was stricken when his body as filled with renewed rage. There was no outlet for him to vent the boundless anger that bloated every corner of his being. He pointed menacingly at them, one by one, starting with Matthew and ending with John, shouting, “Douche! Douche! Douche! DOUCHE!!! How have you let everything fallen upon me? Am I the only one sensible enough to tell this story? Am I the only one who can so much as remember what our dear friend said? Is it up to me alone to write it all down? Did our friend sacrifice himself in vain?”

Judas wept. He vainly wiped away his tears as he sat back down to his own growing pile unfinished scrolls. Meanwhile Matthew, who hadn’t been given a chance to answer said nothing, secure in the knowledge that he had recorded their friend’s sermon as well as he could. Before he returned to his writing, however, he quietly pulled out a scroll identified only by a scratchy XXVII. Counting down a few lines into the text, he found the last entry he had made which mentioned Judas. He vengefully appended it with, “…and Judas went and hanged himself.”

I woke with a start. It was a strange dream. The decided that the best thing about the dream was that it wasn’t the nightmare I had been expecting. I didn’t know how I knew that I was in store for a nightmare, but I knew that one was owed me and was glad that I hadn’t suffered one this night.

Without stirring, I began to think about the previous day and puzzled over Candy’s relationship. Perhaps my intuitions were wrong and all of the assumptions I had made were wrong too. Certainly, I was not Candy’s keeper, let alone mentor. Perhaps this Roland had been her keeper all along. I could not be living in Purgatory, because every one of my friends would agree that Hawaii is paradise. I could not be suffering from the sins of pride. No one suffers from the sins of pride any more.

Still, there were unanswered questions. Was meeting Candy just an accident? How could she be so naive? Why did Roland appear so indifferent toward her? How did my life seem to fit into Dante’s divine comedy like a hand into a well formed glove? What was Roland’s role in this story?

I wondered again if I was really suffering for my pride. More questions popped into my head with seemingly no answer and decided to suppress them with a plan of action. If it was possible to suffer for one’s pride, then I would have to rid myself of the things that I took pride in. That was simple enough to reason.

To start, I would have to leave my apartment and perhaps Hawaii altogether, since both locations fuelled my pride. I would have to sell my car; like most automobile enthusiasts, I was certainly proud of my car. I would have to reduce my relationship with my friends to an arms-length. Certainly I felt pride being seen with the more attractive and influential among them. Lastly, I thought about my wife. How could I not beam with pride over my wife? Certainly, this would have to be my one indulgence.

I considered then that without the apartment or Hawaii or the cool car or the large collection of friends, I might not have a wife left to be proud of. I knew that she had grown quite accustomed to the life I was providing and might be loath to part with any of it. This was the proverbial Scylla and Charibdis of old. I supposed that if an austerity program caused her to leave, then I would be free of pride and my penance would be complete.

The only thing that haunted me was what if I was wrong? I supposed that if I was not in some sort of Purgatory and this was all my imagination, then an austerity program would simply be self-sabotage and harmful to my status, social standing and relationships for no good reason at all. I stared at the stipple in the ceiling, looking for a pattern. “A thought!” I thought; I needed a clever thought.

I rolled out of bed, clambered into the shower and let the morning thought process begin. My best thoughts always came to me in the shower. Well that is to say, if it’s a normal everyday shower experience without screaming or interruptions. I washed my hair and put my head under the showerhead stream and let my thoughts swirl around like ballerinas on a grand stage, dipping this way, lilting that and leaping to and fro.

Then one idea caught my eye. It was a clever idea, wearing the best ballerina costume of them all. Of course! I would conduct a test. Scientific method would get to the root of all these questions. All I had to do is conduct a simple test and examine the results. If the results pointed to my life mirroring Dante’s then my austerity program would have to follow. If the results were inconclusive, I’d know that my recent divine revelations were all in my imagination.

The test, I decided, would be to act out the opposite of the obvious cure. Rather than embrace the humility that one would naturally need to escape Purgatory, I decided to indulge myself wildly with pride. I’d make a spectacle of everything that gave me pride and monitor the results. If pride was the problem then it could be witnessed that even more pride would certainly accelerate my descent back to hell.

I was elated at having come up with this clever new idea, but overall I didn’t feel good particularly about myself. Drying off, I recalled that the night previous I had exploited my friendship with Candy to gain some sort of camaraderie with my mother-in-law. I’d been in league with the devil before, but never quite so literally. I could taste the stench of it as though it had permeated my entire body. I wondered whether this nausea was one of the purgatorial punishments in store for me.

I decided to atone for that particular sin at another time and began to plan for my experiment with excessive pride. To fully awaken my pride, I’d have to let everything out of the bag. I’d have to flaunt whatever excess I could afford, display whatever feathers I could unfurl. This experiment, I concluded could cause damage of its own. I would monitor the situation carefully, however, with special attention to the aspects of my life that were already damaged and watch to see if those areas grew more intolerable, eased, or stayed the same. If they were to grow even slightly more intolerable, then I would have proof that pride was to blame.

It was a capital plan. I decided that it would not profit me to go into work today and waited face the women as they awoke. A proud man would take strict possession of the throne in his kingdom and that’s just what I did. I made myself a coffee and sat down at my computer to have a look at what was going on in the world. There was some bullshit about the Patriot act taking away any rights I thought I might have had while living in the US. There were a few chat requests from friends around the world and I granted these requests, as proudly as possible. In a moment of weakness, I checked to see what was going on at work. As usual, there was nothing going on at work.

After losing myself in Internet chat Angelica awoke. She seemed surprisingly fresh and high-spirited for someone that had just opened her eyes. I braced myself slightly as she started to speak.

“Robyn, did you hear last night?”

I shrugged. They only ever spoke in Macedonian. There was never anything for me to hear.

“It’s Henri, my husband. He asked for me to return on Sunday. Did you hear?”

Oh frabjous day! I did not hear this. I thought about my dream with Judas. I wondered if this news could be related. Henri spoke French and I understood a little of that; much more than I understood Macedonian in any case. I tried to do a little Freudian free association in my head… “Judas. Betrayer. Betrayal. Hanging. Lie. Lying. Masked betrayal. Why the hell was I being sympathetic to Judas in my dreams?”

I clearly had no talent for free association. Maybe logic would work. I started again. Betrayal had to be in there somewhere. In Dante’s Inferno, the Beast spent all of his days chewing on Judas. If Judas was not the betrayer, then… Wait! My beast was chewing on me and I hadn’t betrayed anyone, despite her invitations for me to betray Svetlana. The Beast in Dante needed sinners to be relevant and so did mine. She wanted or rather needed me to sin, but like me, she had overlooked my pride. She hadn’t figured out that perhaps, I was sinning enough already.

“Did you hear me?” Angelica said, clearing her throat.

“Oh yes! Oh wow… ummm… So you’ll be leaving Sunday?” I confirmed, trying desperately not to show my overflowing levels of excitement from the news.

“Yes, I think is best that I go back as he asked. Henri is not feeling well and I should be with him.”

“Well then, I think we should make sure that we send you off in style. There are only two more nights. I think that tonight we should return to the Le Baron Noir! What do you say to that?”

“This is a brilliant idea!” said Angelica, who seemed to be genuinely thrilled at the suggestion.

“Well then. Tell Svetlana when she wakes and I will round up the usual suspects.”

I decided right then that I would go in to work. I rushed into the bedroom and changed into work clothes that could pass as night time drinking and carrying on clothes. I stopped briefly to shower my beautiful bride with light morning kisses and after whispering a drawn out “Je t’aime,” I headed to the office. The office, I decided would be a great command center to plan the evening’s festivities.

It was mid-morning when I arrived downtown and thought I could take care of my pledge to Candy right away. I called. One ring. “Hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!”

“Hey gorgeous! Ready for coffee?” I asked?

“Yes of course! I’ll be at MY Starbucks in ten minutes. Can you get me my special?”

“Yes of course,” I replied. “See you there.”

I was already near Candy’s Starbucks and headed straight in. I ordered and paid for her custom frappuchino, my ordinary latte and took them to a little table in an outdoor nook facing Bishop Street. The sun was warm, my mother-in-law was leaving, I was embracing my pride and the world was good. When Candy arrived, I hardly noticed. I did notice. She was wearing a red and white print dress and she looked like heaven.

She sat at the table and we exchanged our traditional fake kiss. I took a moment to enjoy the setting a second time now that Candy was in it. I imagined how another man might pass by our little protected nook and see me sitting with Candy. I imagined how he might feel the slightest bit of envy. I let it feed my pride. I imagined that he had more envy still and my pride began to swell.

“So what’s new in your life? It feels like we haven’t talked since forever!”

“It was yesterday, baby.” I chuckled.

“Tell, tell, tell!”

“OK. Well the first thing is that I’ve been meeting you every day as per our pledge, but I’ve been meeting you outside of my life. I’ve decided that this has to change.”

Candy drew a pout. “You’re not going to break your promise are you?”

“No, of course not. What I was going to say is that I’ve been avoiding my home and I’m not going to do that anymore. I’d like you to meet me at my house more often, after work, or whenever is best for you, so that we can keep our pledge, but that I can also keep my life the way it is. Do you think that will work? You’ll get to see more of Svetlana that way.”

I had successfully won an argument with my own brain that Candy should spend more time with Svetlana. This, I had decided, would be good for both her training and for my pride.

“I’d love to see more of Svetlana,” Candy announced, “but won’t she be bothered if I’m around your house all the time?”

“I’m quite sure that she will enjoy your company,” I lied. I really wasn’t sure at all.

“Well I love Svetlana and Angelica. I can’t wait to start spending more time with them.”

“That leads me to my next bit of news,” I added. “Angelica will be cutting her trip short… I mean it was extended, but shorter than the… she will be leaving on Sunday.”

Candy’s eyes grew wide like something was wrong.

“Her husband is missing her and she is going back to take care of him,” I assured her.

Candy looked relieved and I secretly marvelled at my own words, since I could not imagine anyone missing my mother-in-law. If I was Henri, I would have surely changed my name and moved to another country by now.

“Oh we should do something for Angelica before she goes,” Candy said.

“I’m already on it. We are all going to Le Baron Noir tonight. I’ll set the time for about seven. If you want to come to Chez Robyn between after work and then, I’m sure that the girls will be happy to see you.”

“Oh I’d love to, but I have to go to church Friday night to mark the Sabbath, but I will come out after that.”

“You know, it doesn’t make any sense to mark the Sabbath and then go out drinking. Skip this week and come out with us. It might be your last chance to see Angelica. Hey, maybe you can invite your friend from church, remember? Maybe she’s had a chance to study her Bible since then.”

Candy smiled politely at this and after a pause, allowed herself to laugh at this. I was already laughing courteously and started to laugh from my belly as soon as Candy opened up. I did a quick pantomime of her friend bowing her head and charging out of Le Baron Noir which was evidently a good impression as Candy broke into a full laugh. With tears of laughter in our eyes and still giggling, we got up from the table and headed for the door.

“OK,” Candy said. “I’ll walk over to your place after work. I hope Svetlana can help me to freshen up a little for the night out.”

“Svetlana,” I assured her, “has all of the latest technologies in female grooming known to man. And many things that are undoubtedly unknown to man. You’ll be in good hands.”

“Then it’s a date!”

Candy presented the back of her cheek for a goodbye kiss and skipped off to work. It was 11am and about time for me to get to the office. I had a party to arrange. Denizens of the office greeted my late arrival with a mixture of suspicion and revelry. Some were happy to see that at least someone at the office wasn’t underneath the thumb of “the man”, while others showed increasing amounts of contempt for my late arrivals and sundry no-shows. I brushed off the contempt quite easily. My mother-in-law was leaving town. A public flogging in the boardroom would only have slightly dented my fully inflated mood.

Shutting the door behind me, I swung into my desk chair and fumbled for Jamie’s number on my phone.

“No,” she replied, “but there is nothing else that I can imagine that would make you this excited.”

“Well, bring your psychic powers to the Baron’s tonight. It is a time for celebration!”

“Oh, tonight? I have a date, but I’ll let you know.”

“Noooooooooo!” I protested. “You’re services are needed at the Baron’s. Bring your date with you. He might even still like you after he meets us.”

Jamie quoted some personal dating statistics she had compiled, noting the instances where I had met her prospective dates. The numbers seemed to indicate that I was somehow badly influencing her overall dating fortunes. This was not a total surprise to me, though I never expected to hear actual statistics broken out so succinctly.

“OK, OK, I’ll see what I can do,” Jamie relented. “It’s not a promise.”

“Thank you, baby! See you there!”

We said our formal goodbyes and I popped open facebook to make the rest of my invitations. I invited Heather of course, other Jamie, Melanie, and a half a dozen other women on my short list. It wasn’t more than a few minutes later before I had a couple of confirmations. Having concluded my morning business, I hopped up from my desk and stalked the office for someone to take to lunch.

As a contractor, I used to take the executive HANICans out to lunch regularly, usually one at a time to gather their thoughts on how my projects were going. I’d always pay, so as to ensure the chance of their acceptance and increase their candidness while we chatted over lunch. As an employee, I was more likely to take less senior staff for lunch. They never questioned me about my work and this was a good thing, since it was nearly impossible for me to actually do anything useful.

June answered the call. She was a simultaneously mousy and self determined go-getter from the underwriting department. HANICans soon learned that when they had unsolvable problems, that June would eventually solve them, whether they were related to her department or not. June seemed to balance her apparent dutiful loyalty to the workplace and my contempt for employment in general with the greatest of ease. She made me wait less than two minutes before we were in downtown Honolulu and ready to choose a lunch spot.

Hawaiians take their food very seriously, that is to say they are not terribly concerned with quality, but they are concerned with quantity and variety. For example, where many North American cities might have an Asian food restaurant simultaneously serving sushi, pho, and won ton soup, downtown Honolulu features Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, Thai, Japanese, and Philippine food each with very different menus and often competing with one another side by side. The only similarity between them is that they all serve a lot of food for the money.

“Italian?” I asked.

June nodded willingly as she always did. I wondered momentarily if I could have made a suggestion that she wouldn’t have agreed to. It didn’t matter. Soon we were seated, beverages and two chicken cannellini specials were ordered and the conversation began.

“OK, I had this dream last night and I wondered what you might think about it.”

“Oh,” she said, “I thought you were going to start talking about work.”

“No. Fuck work. I want to tell you about this dream,” I continued.

I recited the dream to her starting with Judas’ tears and ending in Matthew’s unkind entry into the twenty-seventh chapter of his gospel. June listened in what appeared to be an equal measure interest and astonishment. The food arrived and she seemed almost more interested than I had hoped she would be, barely touching her food until the story was over. After the dream had been laid before her, I took a bite of chicken and asked; mouth still half full. “By the way, have you ever read the gospels?”

“Of course!” She exclaimed. “I’m originally from Tennessee. I think I had a copy of the bible in my crib. I’m actually quite a bit more surprised that you’ve read them.”

“It’s just an elaborate parlour trick for me. I quote them or correct other peoples’ misquotes to win drinks in the bar,” I explained as June raised an eyebrow. “Now they gospels float around in my head with nothing else to do but invade the occasional dream I guess. So, what do you think?”

“Well…” She paused. “Who were you in the dream?”

I paused. I ate. I thought. Who was I in the dream? Was I Judas? Had I been accused of betrayal and looking for sympathy? I thought about whose faces I could see in the dream. I was looking at Judas. I clearly wasn’t him. I remembered John’s face too, when Judas accused him. Then I remembered Luke and then Mark. What a vivid imagination I had. Somewhere in my brain the images of four disciples were floating around just for me to use in my dreams.

I thought about Matthew. There was no face. I thought about when Matthew pulled out the scroll. It was my hand! I wasn’t the betrayer. I was the storyteller and I had changed the story to make the betrayer even more despicable. I changed the story to make the betrayer as evil as I could make him out to be. It was a strange dream.

“I was Matthew!” I exclaimed, almost a little too excited about the discovery.

June twisted her face a little.

“Uh huh,” she said with mocking disbelief. “I have to get back to work.”

“Oh dammit! I haven’t even eaten anything yet. Go ahead. I’ll get this and catch up with you later.”

“It was certainly interesting!” she said as she gathered her purse and rushed for the door.

Alone.

There are few urban experiences that give a greater sense of aloneness than sitting in a restaurant at a table for one. I hurriedly resumed eating my meal while considering the revelation that my dreams had been making me into Matthew. I knew that my mother-in-law had laid the groundwork for me to think about betrayal and I began to muse at how my dreams provided me with my very own Judas for experimentation purposes.

My wife would play the part of Judas of course since that was the only person who could betray me with any real effect on my life. The gospels go on to tell about how the beast had entered Judas. I had my own beast; that checked out. Like Matthew Levi, the former tax collector, I worked with numbers and other people’s money. All I needed were a couple of other bit players and I had myself a sorted out dream.

Or did I? Was my dream some sort of prophesy or was it just screaming the glaringly obvious to me, that I was in peril of betrayal. I could not accept that. I knew that my marriage was on a slippery slope, but betrayal was not a possibility. Perhaps there was another betrayal at hand. Perhaps I would be betrayed professionally. Perhaps a co-worker was laying a trap to end my employment. I could speculate no further. I couldn’t imagine that I was important enough in anyone’s life to be considered for betrayal. I decided to shelve my thoughts on this topic and return to my life; to real life and leave my dream world behind for a time.

Between fiddling with the software that I would present the following week and chatting with co-workers and checking and re-checking my facebook page, the afternoon flew past without incident. I was ready for the Baron and I could already taste the bubbles that were about to flow. I was about to call Svetlana and let her know that I’d head straight to the Baron’s from work, in order to secure the back bar for our personal use, when the phone rang.

“Hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!!!”

It was Candy. “Hey baby!” I chirped, “Have you made plans for the evening? I’m taking Svetlana and Angelica to the Baron Noir later for celebratory drinks. Angelica is on her way home on Saturday. Would you like to come along with us?”

“You invited me to your house, this morning, silly!”

“Oh dammit, I’m sorry. I actually did some work this afternoon. I guess I forgot. OK. Don’t move, I’ll meet you on the street and we can walk to my place together.”

I made a u-turn and walked briskly to intercept Candy on Merchant Street. I found her there standing coyly shifting her balance from one leg to the other by bending one knee, then the next. It made the skirt of her dress wave seductively in the wind. Glancing around I noticed that I was not the only one noticing her. She was a vision. I caught up to her and pecked her on the cheek.

“We walk!” I exclaimed. “How was your day? Did you earn your keep?”

“Oh it is the same every day.” She confided, “I’m all over the place at the office doing different things for everyone. I wish I could just get settled in one department.”

“Be thankful you feel needed. A person can never underrate that feeling; and I don’t just mean at work.”

We walked. Candy sang. When we didn’t have anything specific to talk about Candy would break into little voice exercises, or practice some song she was working for the Honolulu Opera. She would attract strange stares when she did this. We attracted strange stares. I think that perhaps people would think that I should stop her from singing and attracting stares. I loved her singing, however and I was not likely to stop anything so beautiful; not for something as selfish as stopping strange stares.

We arrived at the apartment full of energy. Strange Macedonian conversation flowed from the lanai. I walked outside to greet Svetlana with a kiss. “I have a surprise for you,” I said.

“Hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!!!” Candy called as she swung around behind me and reached for Angelica.

“Oh, what a great surprise!” cried Angelica.

“Oh, it is so good to see you too!” cried Candy.

The women chirped and cooed and echoed in the wind. I withdrew to the kitchen for a glass of Chablis and a moment to reflect. It was impossible. Coherent thought failed me as a wave of mixed emotions cascaded through my brain. My mother-in-law was leaving. I would have time alone with Svetlana to iron out our troubles. Candy would be a fun distraction from the everyday and maybe even make a good sister for Svetlana, who I had decided, spent too much time alone in the apartment. I downed my first glass of Chablis and walked out to the lanai with three glasses and a bottle for Candy and the women. They were all eager for to get started on the evening.

By the second glass of Chablis, the three of them were stripped down to their underwear and running in and out of the bedroom wearing this outfit and that, periodically asking me for my opinion. They asked whether the black shoes were better than the silver. They asked whether a certain dress needed a belt, or whether a wide belt was better than a narrow belt. They asked if the jewellery matched the dress or the belt or the shoes. They showered. They applied make-up and they dressed in their selected outfits and announced that they were ready; nearly ready. Svetlana, at the last minute, changed out of her dress and into one of her earlier selections. Now we were ready. I called a cab to meet us downstairs and in moments we were off to the Baron’s for a night of adventure.

It was a five minute ride to the Baron’s and we wasted no time in getting ourselves to the back bar. We climbed aboard our barseats, first Candy, then me, then Svetlana and lastly Angelica. It didn’t take Vincent more than a moment to start boasting about his new secret stash of wines from around the world and we were all busily dipping into glass after delicious glass.

“To us, baby.” I added as I clinked Svetlana’s glass and carefully looked into her eyes.

“To us, too!” Candy added, clinking her glass into mine.

“You look so beautiful, Candy. Just like my daughter. It is incredible,” interrupted Angelica.

For the first time in the evening I noticed that Candy had changed a little. At first I thought it was an illusion, or my brain playing a little trick on me. I looked at Candy more closely, then Svetlana and back again. There was a change. Candy looked a lot more like Svetlana. I checked and rechecked. I cleaned my glasses. It was true. After repeated checks, it seemed clear that Svetlana had made up Candy to look just like herself. They had the same eye shadow, the same lipstick, the same eyebrow pencil, the same mascara and the same blush.

“Baby?” I asked, looking at Svetlana quizzically.

She was about to answer when I noticed over my right shoulder that Jamie had walked through the entranceway with a tall, possibly Indian-looking fellow behind her.

“Jamie!” I shouted.

“Oh, Jamie!” Candy repeated.

The other two women made no verbal acknowledgement of Jamie’s entrance and only nodded before returning to their drinks and each other.

“Hey everyone! This is Vraj.”

Sliding off my stool, I leaned in for Jamie’s hello kiss. She usually aimed for my cheek, but this evening it was on the lips for reasons I could only guess. Perhaps she was expecting more from Vraj later tonight. I shook Vraj’s hand, only to find his handshake to be far less firm than I might have expected. I slid back onto the barstool and waved for the bartender’s attention to herald the arrival of our new friends.

“Hey, why don’t we all move to that table in the corner while we still can? There will be room for all of us there.” Jamie said.

I glanced across the bar. Svetlana, Candy and the beast all pretended not to have even heard her suggestion. Women can be so cruel to one another I thought, as I found myself in a rather typical situation. I was once again caught between the desires of to women.

“Yes. Secure the table Jamie and we’ll be there shortly after we get our bar tab sorted,” I said to buy some time. I was counting on Vraj to keep her entertained while I coaxed the women to leave their seats.

It took about an hour to pry the women away from the bar to take up a position in the corner of the room. We sat at a large table for about 10 people. Heather floated in and kissed me on the cheek. I had no sooner begun to wonder why she had only kissed me on the cheek when I noticed what might have been her fiancé trailing behind her.

“Oh you’ve found him!” I exclaimed, reaching past her to shake his hand.

“Yes. I just got back to…”

“Yes he’s back to help finish our move,” she interrupted. “Then our wedding is two weeks after that. The only problem is that we haven’t found a place for the wedding reception. We have decided on Bellow’s beach for a beach wedding, but really where we go from there is still in the air.”

“I’m sure something will turn up. I can ask around too if you like.”

“Oh you are such a sweetheart,” she confided. “Please do. Oh! I almost forgot. Come to our house for a bit of a housewarming party next weekend. We would love to have you.”

I looked up at Brad, who nodded in agreement.

“Well, unfortunately Svetlana will be back in Paris that week, but I could drop by on my own.”

“Oh don’t be silly! Bring Candy with you!”

I didn’t fully understand her excitement with the idea of me bringing Candy, but I said that I would speak to Candy about the possibility and let her know.

More friends came by our corner of the Baron Noir. Amazon came next, a tall redhead who might remind you of a cross between an actress and a martial arts champion. Unlike Candy, Amazon wasn’t born Amazon. It was a nickname that suited her personality and she took to using it herself. Her presence was stunning and severe and generally overtook most situations. At our table, however, she in this group she just numbered among the large personalities rest. She took a point position at one end of the table and never sat, enabling herself to break away to talk to this person or that, for it seemed as though she knew nearly everyone.

Friends and local celebrities poured through the back room door. Some stopped long enough to greet everyone and some stopped to join the merriment. One reveller who I was happy to see, was an older fellow I knew named Marcel. Marcel’s real name escapes my memory, but he explained that he needed a second name for partying. In this way he could party in the most outrageous way, he argued, without his party persona being mistaken for his professional persona. In real life I gathered that he was a professor of medicine, though the topic of medicine never came up in conversation at any parties where I had run into him.

What made this meeting of Marcel stand out in my mind was that through no small effort he engineered the seating arrangement of our group to put himself next to Angelica. At first, I pitied him and was going to warn him that she was… Upon reflection I thought that she was leaving and no harm could be done. I left them all at the table briefly to go and hunt for Candy who had flitted off. I thought that she was perhaps overdue from checking in with us and was curious as to what she had discovered elsewhere.

I found her at the front bar, chatting with a couple of taller gentlemen with whom I had never made an acquaintance. They were tourists (one could tell from the white sneakers) and had taken an interest in Candy for the obvious reason of capping a visit to Hawaii with a nice last minute conquest. Candy had no idea of their intentions of course and chatted away as though she had just made two new best friends. I could see the look of disappointment in their eyes as I sidled up to Candy and whispered to her.

“Hey! We have an invite for next weekend if you are interested.”

Candy’s already visible glow intensified. “Invite? Where?”

“Heather and her future hubby asked if we’d fly up to their new place next Saturday. Apparently the view is amazing and Heather has the largest wine cellar of anyone I’ve ever heard of.”

“Oh perfect!” She said, feigning a slight pout, “But what about Svetlana?”

“She has to go back to Paris this week, so Heather asked me to invite you. They are preparing for their wedding and, of course would like us to go to that too, but they are also in a panic for a place to host their wedding reception.”

Candy, screwed up her face for a moment. The tourists, who were talking to themselves during our conversation started heading for the door.

“I’ve got it! They can have the reception at Raymond’s!”

“Really?” I asked sceptically.

“Really, really, silly! I’ll call him right now and ask. It’s for the Saturday after next, right?”

“Wow, are you sure you should ask?”

Thought of Raymond’s indifference with Candy welled up in my thoughts. Before she could answer she had a cell phone to her ear and was walking out the front door of the Baron’s. I caught up with her just in time to hear. “Uh huh… uh huh… Ooooh! I love you Raymond! Bye bye!”

Candy’s wattage was at a maximum setting. Her glow lit the street.

“The reception is going to be at Raymond’s!!!!! Oh I have to tell Heather. Come! Let’s tell Heather!”

Almost embarrassed at the sudden news, I followed Candy back to the back bar. Being a little too late to make the announcement, I saw the two women jumping up and down in a loose embrace. I was given a shower of kisses by both of them for having solved Heather’s problem so suddenly. For an instant, I thought that this would be good for my pride experiment. My pride faded quickly, however, when I got the creepy feeling that I was being watched. This shower of kisses could most certainly be used by someone as a flagrant example of my imagined infidelity.

I turned slowly back to look toward Angelica. Svetlana had paid the scene no mind and was chatting with Vraj and Jamie. They were holding hands across the table and…

“No fucking way!” I muttered to myself.

My eyes rounded onto the impossible. Angelica was kissing and being kissed by Marcel. They were passionate kisses; not the kind of kisses that one might give as a prelude to sex, but rather the kind of kisses that one would receive during sex. My brain was incapable of processing this information and I looked away as quickly as I could.

I returned to the attention still being showered upon me. Heather was joking about how with all the women in my life, I’d still have trouble finding a date for her wedding, since Svetlana would be gone, Candy would be with Raymond and it looked like Jamie was quite happy with her new find.

“I’m sure there is someone out there who is not too embarrassed to be seen with me,” I chuckled.

Candy confirmed that we would be there next Saturday and I invited the whole table to join us at Chez Robyn’s for a nightcap. In an unusual precedent, everyone had an excuse; everyone except Marcel. Marcel was the only taker and such a very eager one at that. In what seemed like only moments, the four of us had finished our champagne, cleaned up the bar tab and rocketed back to our apartment in Marcel’s incredibly large SUV. In what seemed a twinkle, Svetlana was lounging on the settee, Marcel and Angelica on the divan and I was selecting a bottle of champagne for the occasion.

“What goes with betrayal?” I murmured to myself. That was easy; Cava. It pretends to be champagne and then when it’s too late, you discover that it isn’t.

I carried two glasses out to Marcel and Angelica. No longer satisfied with kissing, Marcel had taken to massaging Angelica’s tits. She laughed as though it were a mere trifle. Marcel reluctantly freed one of his hands from Angelica’s breasts to take the champagne. Angelica; when she reached for her glass she gave me a look. It was a steely look that one might expect from a war general on the front lines of battle, a general who smeared with blood, both enemy and friendly. She knew that she could do whatever she wanted and that I was helpless to do anything about it. She knew she held the key to my marriage and all I had to do was cross her.

What could I do? I could tell her secret to Henri. Unlike her, I liked Henri. Would he be more hurt by knowing about this scene or not knowing? I was certainly more hurt by knowing. It was too late. I knew. I fetched Svetlana her glass and remained silent for the rest of the spectacle. As we all grew tired, Marcel had failed to coax Angelica back to his place and eventually he made his retreat. He thanked us for the wine and the company and departed. Angelica had made quite enough use of him.

I went to bed alone.

I thought about my dream. Yes, I was Matthew the chronicler, but I was also John with all his pedantry and nonsense who kept missing the point. I was Mark who could barely write and for a moment I was Luke who seemed to miss half the story. I was Judas too. I wanted more from my other parts and wept because I knew that I would never get what I needed from them. I had betrayed myself and soon I would be sacrificed.

This was not a dream about five disciples I decided; it was a dream about five writers who had an important story to tell and disagreed on how to tell it. Little did I know how prophetic the dream would be in the months to follow as my own writing began to take form.

I made myself scarce the next day. Angelica packed and schemed with Svetlana. I went for a long walk that took up the better part of the day. I had a quick Starbucks with Candy in keeping with our pledge. She was still on a high about the upcoming wedding and it was the only thing she seemed capable of talking about.

That evening, I found the women still packing. I didn’t take note of what they said to each other, since it was mostly in Macedonian anyway, but Angelica caught my attention at one point when Svetlana was in the bathroom.

“She’s a slave!” she accused. “To you, she is nothing but a cheap slave!”

That was the last thing she ever said to me. I ignored her through dinner and went to bed early; alone again. When I awoke, Svetlana was sleeping next to me. The sun was pouring in the windows. I lurched out of bed and stumbled into the living room. That beast, that mother-in-law, that horrible, horrible creature was gone.

Saturday, September 25, 2010

In Christian lore, there are two kinds of sin, mortal sin and venial sin. If you happen to commit the former type of sin, you are screwed. Mortal sins are unforgivable by gods, people, wives and mothers-in-law alike. Venial sins are the class of forgivable sins. So long as the gods, those you’ve trespassed or possibly your wife will give you time to repent, almost any venial sin can be washed away and your soul once again made pure.

In the middle ages, the Catholic Church took the cleansing of venial sins very seriously. They even went so far as to create a whole new imaginary place called Purgatory for just such a purpose. They went even further by selling indulgences to the living and prayer services for the dead to help the faithful manage their way through this dark and terrible place with the least trouble possible. One day, to the delight of many, a plucky young poet named Dante wrote many cantos describing the place in great and morbid detail.

As you might imagine, purgatory is an awful place. It basically consists of a remote mountain sticking out of the opposite side of the earth from Jerusalem with repentant sinners clinging to it on all sides. Every inhabitant is a sinner undergoing some sort of dreadfully painful atonement for their sins. The lucky ones, who are assisted through prayer (and money) by anyone who hasn’t yet joined them in Purgatory, are able to skip the interminably long punishment lines. They are afforded an escape from their awful fate and get to start enjoying the good life in a hurry. If I didn’t know better, I would swear that Dante’s Purgatory was an exact literary replica of the island of Oahu.

I woke that morning feeling good. It was an incredible contrast to the day before. I didn’t hurt. I had a skip in my step. I even caught myself singing “The Mayor of Bayswater” in the shower. As I showered, I imagined singing for an American Idol audition. Simon might not have sent me to Hollywood after hearing this cheeky number, I reasoned, but I was certain that he would have liked it. I hummed it into my morning shave and through the application of hair gel and cologne, finishing it off in my brassiest baritone, “And the hair from her dicky-dido hung down to her knees.”

The applause in the bathroom roared. It was just me whispering an excited “Ahhhhhhhh!” to myself, in such a way that it convincingly mimicked the screams of about ten thousand exuberant fans. I considered the contrast of my very on-pitch singing today (having done each of the three harmony parts in turn) with the horrifying noises that I must have produced in the bathroom only yesterday. The women, had they been awake for both performances, might have concluded that I was quite insane.

Today, I was ready for anything. Hell was behind me and Purgatory lay ahead. If Dante taught me anything, it is that Purgatory is doable. There was only one mountain to climb and I had been freshly and soundly shagged. There is something miraculous about being well bedded; it makes a man feel that he can do anything.

I knelt down to kiss my still sleeping Svetlana goodbye and whispered. “Je t'aime, mon chou,” into her ear. She didn’t stir, but smiled as she always did, feeling my kisses with her sleeping sixth sense. With a kick in my step, I headed out the door to the office, but not before perusing my bookcase for something to thumb through. It was obvious. Dante’s Purgatory jumped out, begging to be re-read. It was so coincidentally apropos that had it been standing next to a copy of “How to Get Rid of a Meddling Mother-in-Law,” I might have chosen it still. This would be educational. Surely Dante and his trusty guide Virgil would quickly lead me out of my own personal Purgatory.

I found myself still singing when I arrived at the office. After about an hour of work, I’d punched enough keys on the keyboard to meet or exceed the efforts of the past 5 weeks. I let the CEO know that there would be a showing of new software on Wednesday; a software engineer must release new things from time to time to stay relevant. I started into my new book and by the end of the first canto was ready to call Candy.

“Hi,” she said sullenly.

“Hi?” Was all I could think to say. Her familiar exuberance was gone. It suddenly made things greyer than the vog.

“Coffee time! My treat!” I chirped, to throw some excitement back into the air.

I was aware, having said this, that since I had known Candy, it was always my treat.

Despite her lacklustre greeting, Candy agreed to meet at our usual Starbucks, the one closest to her office. When I arrived at the register to order her special frappuccino, it had already been made. She had phoned in her order. I took our drinks to the spot with the comfy chairs and found Candy sitting there waiting. She was wearing a very pouty face.

“Whatever is the matter, my dear?” I said in a consoling voice.

“I felt like you were ignoring me yesterday.”

Really? I’d taken her driving for hours, walked on the beach, unloaded my problems and… Her pouty look continued to sear holes through the back of my head. I had to try and imagine exactly when I had possibly ignored her. It was impossible; I couldn’t think of a moment. It was time for an emergency blanket apology.

“I’m sorry, baby. I didn’t mean to ignore you. I was really in the most terrible mood yesterday. I’m a lot better now. It won’t happen again.”

“It just felt like you were only interested in Heather and it was all about her and you didn’t seem to care about anything that I had to say.” She scolded.

Aha! Then I understood. It was true. I was interested in Heather’s story. I suppose that I had imagined that she was also interested. I further imagined that had I not been there they would have carried on famously without me while Heather told her story, but now I knew I was wrong about that. I decided it best to cling to the apology I’d already made.

“Oh, Candy. I was just feeling a little down. That’s all. You have my full attention now!” I offered.

“Good!” She said as the sparkle start to return to her eyes. “Now promise me that you will never do that again.”

“I promise.” I said, not really being sure of what I was promising, but my pledge had melted the pout from Candy’s face and her sparkle flourished into a blaze. That was all that mattered at this moment.

Thinking back to everything that was said on the previous day, I suddenly remembered Candy’s contribution. It was a bombshell. She had a fiancé; a soulmate no less. From the time I’d know her she had never so much as mentioned anything like this in her life and yesterday she let it spill like it was absolutely nothing.

“So tell me, now that we have each other’s undivided attention. How long have you been engaged to Roland?”

“Raymond,” she corrected hurriedly. “For over a year now.”

“I can’t understand why you hadn’t mentioned him before yesterday. Is this supposed to be a secret affair? Is this relationship more of a fanciful idea of your mother’s as opposed to a romance of your own?”

“Oh no,” she lied. At least I think she was lying. “Raymond and I had a very strong connection when we first met. He has immeasurable faith in the Lord, and that’s what attracted me to him. He’s a very loving man. He spreads the Word on a Christian radio station three nights a week. We should listen to his show together! Also, as you know, he has this beautiful horse ranch in Waimonalo where Heather’s wedding reception will be. We could even go out there to ride if you want to.”

“So why didn’t you mention him before? Does he know about me?”

“Oh, silly! Everyone knows about you. It’s just that we have had so much else to talk about that I didn’t think that Raymond would fit into the conversation. You and I are always in such a rush!”

I had heard lies before and I was hearing one right at this moment. There is no way that a fiancé can slip one’s mind any more than a sighting of the Loch Ness monster wearing Star Wars underoos. My angel’s glow had softened in my eyes. She was less angelic all of a sudden. She had a personal agenda and would not stop at lying to conceal it.

“So have you set a date to marry him?” I asked. The truly engaged always have a date set.

“Well, his mother is not well and between that and his radio show, it seems like I only see him at church these days. I think we will start planning things once his mother is better.”

“Now that Roland is an open topic for conversation, I suppose that it’s time for me to meet him don’t you think?”

Candy looked up and to the left for the first time since I’d known her. She schemed. “Yes, let’s meet him tonight! We can listen to his radio show while we drive out to the ranch. Then you can hear him, meet him and get to know him, finally!”

Candy presented me with the back of her jaw for a goodbye kiss and once kissed, she skipped back to work. My evening was planned. I had a brief flash of worry that I my time would be better spent tending to my wounded marriage than wasting an evening sleuthing Candy’s fiancé story, but the worry subsided. I was still in a pretty good mood from the previous evening’s activity and thought I could rather use a drink of some sort to slow down my mind and better contemplate my situation. Despite the truce with my mother-in-law, I still had a situation that needed tender care in handling.

The feeling of being in Purgatory was ever present. I should qualify that. In the middle ages, purgatory was thought of as a real place. I’m sure that if Dante had been to Hawaii, his Purgatory would have consisted of Oahu and a half-dozen increasingly more boring islands such that the more exciting sins would get you the more boring islands as a punishment. Modern Catholics will tell you that Purgatory is not a place at all, however, but rather a process where one is cleansed of their sins to better prepare themselves for a perfect and eternal afterlife.

In Dante’s time, it was theorized that it would take a ridiculously long period of time to purge each and every individual sin; a period of hundreds or thousands of times longer than it took to commit the sin in the first place. I decided that I would not have that kind of time to devote to atonement and began to contemplate methods where I could purge my sins more expeditiously.

Then I wondered. What were my sins exactly? An average person will commit sins of various magnitudes almost every day, from little white lies to surfing the internet on company time, the latter of which would keep me in Purgatory for a very, very, very long time. How does one know which sins even matter anymore? Worshipping another god or taking god’s name in vain are constitutional rights in most countries that also have running water. Somehow I don’t think the ones about honouring one’s father or coveting a neighbour’s ass were relevant either. I suppose that the Ten Commandments were anachronisms even by Christ’s reckoning, since he only mentioned one or two.

So far, my life had been following in Dante’s footsteps, so I turned my thoughts to the seven deadly sins. The seven deadlies are a collection of forgivable or venial sins of a cardinal or really bad nature. In pre-renaissance times, it was determined that cardinal sins, if practiced often enough can add up to a mortal sin and become quite unforgivable. I reasoned that one of these cardinal sins was the likely source of my Purgatorial curse.

I began by ruling out gluttony right away. Though I had a penchant for good food and champagne, I was neither overweight, nor an alcoholic. Avarice was not my problem either, since no amount of money would exceed Svetlana’s ability to spend it. Sloth was right out, I worked day and night. There wasn’t much wrath in me, except a nasty letter to AT&T. Envy; I thought for a moment about envy. After a good long think, I realized that couldn’t come up with a single person on Oahu that I envied. That left lust. Was I lustful? I had a beautiful wife and a multitude of very attractive women friends. Sadly, I didn’t lust after any of them.

I counted the list, again. I only counted six. There was a sin missing. What was it? Pride; oh fuck, it had to be pride. As soon as I had said the word in my mind, I knew it was the obvious answer. All of the grief that I was suffering at this point my life could be traced back a single root cause and that was my ever-present sense of pride.

I did have a beautiful wife and a multitude of very attractive women friends. I had a cool car and a luxury apartment. I was a long time resident of enviable State of Hawaii. All of these aspects of my life fed my pride and the price of keeping these things was dear. I allowed myself to suffer for each and every thing that fed my pride. I suffered at the hands of the banks, the Immigration and Naturalization Services, my clients-come employers, my landlord, the credit card companies, my wife, and now my mother-in-law. Everyone who could make me suffer did and I had endured it all for the sake of my pride.

Then the real problem struck me like lightning. Had I committed any of the other seven deadlies, I would have been fine. I could have easily renounced those varieties of sin and began my penance immediately, but how could I part with my pride? How could I even mitigate it? My whole life up to this point had been an approval-seeking process, where I would pile up the the spoils of my various successes to reinforce my pride. My pride was everything to me. It was my soul.

Up to this point in my life, I had never even considered pride as a sin, especially not my pride. Yes, I had read Dante and Thomas Aquinas and I knew it was big on their lists of deadly sins. Before my predicament, I’d even mocked the list, citing that the seven deadly sins are necessary for the survival of the human race. For the first time in my life, I was seeing that pride had been deadly for me. What was worse is that I would not be able to atone for this sin easily, if I could atone at all. I would not be able to wash away the stains of pride afforded to me by beautiful women, cool cars and an exotic lifestyle without a complete and drastic overhaul of my life.

It was too much to think about. The irony of a sworn atheist being wracked by a cardinal sin was difficult enough to fathom, but there was more. This was happening while I was trapped in Purgatory and responsible for the care of an angel. They symbolism, real or imagined, was more than a sane mind should ever have to bear. At once, I knew what was coming for me in my dreams. A combination of fear and anger caused me to clench my fists in disbelief.

“I will not suffer this!” I swore aloud to an empty sky.

Passersby must have thought me crazy, but I was not far from Hotel Street where crazy is normal. I paid no mind to a gawking woman who blocked my way and made an awkward detour over the grass and around her. I returned to work and realized that my fists were still clenched. I knew my nightmare would return and that I would not be able to stop it. That was certain.

There was no way that I was going to be able to work. I picked up Dante’s Purgatory again and scanned through another few cantos. I hoped that maybe there were clues in it that would help me in what I knew was going to be a difficult time. I didn’t have to read far. The first terrace in Dante’s Purgatory deals with the proud. There, humility is both the punishment and the cure for pride. It was my least favourite emotion and perhaps my most often suffered one. I knew at once that I would suffer a great deal more.

I swore aloud and whipped the book across my desk. It hit the wall with a resounding thud. I wished I hadn’t thrown it. A co-worker or two had seen what I’d done. Now my co-workers would pass around the fact that was going crazy. It was time to go home. Beast or no beast in my home, I was no good to anyone at the office.

After a brisk walk home I arrived to find a happy pair. Mother and daughter were working away in the kitchen, chatting up a storm in their crazy Macedonian tongue. They talked and talked and talked and I could not fathom how it was possible that there was a subject left on earth for them to still be talking about. Svetlana kissed me happily and showed me the treats that she had been preparing for dinner. No one questioned why I was home so early and I did not volunteer an explanation.

I poured myself a very large glass of wine and bade that we change the language of conversation to English. After a bit of chit-chat it was evident that Svetlana was genuinely happy and Angelica seemed to be genuinely lacking her normal look of contempt for me.

“So, you ladies are not going to believe this,” I said temptingly.

“What? What? What?” The women begged.

“Candy has invited me out to a ranch this evening to visit with…”

Both women licked their lips in anticipation.

“…her fiancé!”

“No no, this is not possible,” said Angelica authoritatively. “When would she have time to meet a man when she sees you every day? This is not possible.”

It was a dig, but an uncommonly light one. I took it in stride. “I’m telling you. She had a fiancé all along. Apparently, he has a sick mother or something and she hasn’t seen much of him since she met us, or so she says, because he has not had time for her.”

“I can’t believe this,” Angelica added.

“It’s true!” I exclaimed. “I can take a picture if you like, but I am supposed to drive Candy out to meet him after dinner. I think we should all go out after that and I’ll tell you the whole story. I’m not planning to go in to work tomorrow so I can let my hair down a little tonight.”

I was already well on my way to relinquishing any pride I might have fostering regarding my employment situation. We chatted until dinnertime speculating on what sort of fellow might have captured Candy’s heart. The speculation continued through dinner with each aspect of the fiancé story being weighed and measured. We wondered how he might have courted Candy. We wondered how he asked her to marry him. We wondered if he asked her, or if she asked him or if her mother had set it all up or if anyone had asked anyone.

When dinner was done, Svetlana was practically pushing me out the door to go and fetch the answers to our many speculations. It was quite the opposite scene from the one where I expected to be begging forgiveness for offering Candy a ride. Sometimes Purgatory is simply elegant in its simplicity. I bade the women farewell and raced to my car like a superhero to his secret stash of super stuff.

I arrived at Candy’s at 7pm on the dot, just like we had planned. I called up. She said that she was going to be a few minutes and I punched the radio button for what I expected to be about a five song wait. Surprisingly, only a half a song had managed to play when I spotted Candy running toward the car.

“Hurry! Turn on the radio to AM 777!” Candy shouted as she buckled herself in.

I didn’t even know if I had an AM radio setting. After a minute of fussing with the controls, we were listening to the unmistakable sounds of Christian talk radio. Zzzzzzz, it was going to be a long drive. Raymond seemed pleasant enough on the radio, like a father giving advice to a child at one moment and quietly agreeing with a crazy caller the next. It was funny. The callers could say nearly anything and Raymond would listen patiently, quietly agree and go to the next caller.

Near the end of the show we were hurtling past Hanauma Bay, which is one of the most breathtakingly beautiful sections of road on Oahu. I tuned out to look at the waves and the rocks and…

“I’m going to close the show with the Lord’s Prayer,” said Raymond in his consoling radio voice. “This is a very beautiful version of the prayer that you don’t hear very often and I thought it would be nice to close the show with it today. It was written by one Dante Alighieri in the thirteenth century.”

“Oh! Fourteenth century, dude. It was written in the early 1300’s.” I blurted out.

I turned sharply, sharply enough to make all four tires on my car squeal, a difficult and scary thing to do. Raymond’s mistake had probably saved both of our lives. When he announced that he was going to end with Dante’s version of the Lord’s Prayer, I wondered what the chances were that I had been reading this same prayer only this morning. Dante had associated this very prayer with humility and it was therefore a remedy for pride. My disbelief had caused me to forget that I was driving to contemplate the odds that I was hearing this prayer for a second time in one day. It nearly caused me to drive us both off of a cliff.

Raymond read on,

“Our Father, You who dwell within the heavens
but are not circumscribed by them out of
Your greater love for Your first works above,

Praised be Your name and Your omnipotence,
by every creature, just as it is seemly
to offer thanks to Your sweet effluence…”

There was more of course and as Raymond read, I noticed that Candy had developed tears in her eyes. I imagine that even a non-Christian would have to concede that this was a very beautiful set of verses even after a rough translation from Italian to English.

“Well, we’ve heard his show,” I said. “Will he be as entertaining in person?”

Candy didn’t answer. She was still weeping.

“What’s the matter, baby?” I said in my softest possible voice.

“Oh, it is just so beautiful. Sometimes the Spirit just takes me and goes all through me when I hear so much devotion and such beauty. Wasn’t that a beautiful poem at the end?”

I nodded in agreement and reached over to stroke her shoulder to console her. It was a brief consolation, as I immediately had to downshift while we careened through another tight corner. The stage was set. A weeping angel and an on-air preacher-man were about to show me their incredible love for one another. I had no idea what to expect, having never dreamed that I would see anything like this in my life.

The ranch was not too much further down the road. I arrived at about the same time as an old beaten up Ford pickup. It was a red and white affair that had long since lost its looks to rust. I expected that it might have been Raymond at the helm, returning from his radio show, but how could Candy’s fiancé drive such a wreck? No combination of my brain cells would permit me to picture Candy heading to church in that rust-bucket. I supposed that if he owned a ranch, this couldn’t have been his only vehicle.

I pulled up next to the old Ford and ground to a halt in the gravel driveway. The Porsche had very wide tires and wasn’t comfortable on gravel. It seemed an awkward thing for me that moment, parking next to a farm vehicle. It was the first time I had felt strange behind the wheel since I bought the car. When the truck door opened, a man clearly in his mid 50’s got out. He had curly dark hair and deep set dark eyes and the facial lines of a man who had shouldered many worries. His countenance reminded me of an old farmhand who longed for better days.

“Rayyyyyyyyyyymond!” Candy squealed as she skipped across the gravel, throwing her arms around the older man’s neck.

In the English language there are many synonyms for disbelief, but none that really properly describe the sensation of being completely unable to believe something. Having had a day filled with unbelievable things and having used the word disbelief already several times on this day, I found myself feeling loathe to use it again. When Candy clung onto this old cowpoke, however, my brain was so utterly shocked with disbelief that I feared I might be struck dumb. After the embrace, Candy led him toward me.

“Oh I’ve heard a lot about you,” Raymond said with a knowing smile. “It’s good to know that you are keeping Candy out of trouble.”

“Oh thank you!” I said, trying to gain my composure. I didn’t know anything about him. What could I possibly say? “It’s a nice place you have out here.”

Raymond didn’t answer in a real sort of way. He just tipped his head and gave a little laugh. With a nod here and a gesture there, Raymond directed us up to his house. He had a picnic table in the back and brought out a bottle of wine and three glasses. He clearly lived there alone and I could see that Candy would have difficulty visiting him, since she didn’t have a car. Glancing around, I didn’t see any vehicles other than the rusty old Ford truck. The lack of vehicles alone might have throttled Candy’s relationship with him. I opened the conversation with a question.

“We listened to your radio show on the way out. I wondered where you got the idea to finish your show with Dante’s version of the Lord’s Prayer.”

“Oh, I like to mix things up and show people new things and old things when I can. Did you like that version of the prayer?”

“I liked it very much,” I confessed. “I was quite astonished to hear it, to be honest.”

“Robyn said you got the year wrong,” Candy chirped as a red hue filled my cheeks.

Oh, why did she say that? Here was more disbelief for my day. “Oh, sorry about that,” I floundered. “I just remarked that it was written in the early 1300’s… which is the fourteenth century and then noticed that we were driving off a cliff, so I might have overstated mistake.”

“That woke me up though; you might have saved our lives that moment.” I added. “How did you know about it? How did you decide to use it?”

“The Lord has been with us for a long time,” Raymond explained. “He’s inspired so many of us to wondrous things and great works. I like to use my show to remind people that His Word has been a source of healing and inspiration for people from many generations and parts of the world.”

Raymond smiled knowingly and his dark deep-set eyes sparkled a little in my direction. While he spoke, Candy sat next to him and sometimes on him, continuing to shower him with affection to which he paid absolutely no notice whatsoever. I puzzled. Raymond’s knowing look was altogether too knowing at that moment. I realized that his choice of Dante to end the show was no coincidence. Was he an angel or a devil in the Dantesque play that my life had become? I’d have to sort out his intentions and how he did this magic trick later, but I knew that none of this was an accident.

“But it was a beau…”

“Oh are you talking about that Lord’s Prayer on the radio?” Candy interrupted. “I couldn’t stop myself from crying when I heard that. It is so amazing. I just love it!”

Candy’s need for attention broke the spell of Raymond’s gaze. All of his mannerisms told me that he had something more to tell me, but with the spell broken, the conversation slowed to a standstill. Raymond was visibly tired and it looked like further conversation was starting to physically pain him.

“Well my dearest angel,” I said looking toward Candy. “I think it’s time I head home.”

I said “I” on purpose, not knowing if I would be leaving her here with her magical preacher fiancé or taking her back home with me.

“Can you give me one minute and wait by the car?” Candy asked.

“But of course.”

I thanked Raymond for the wine and the company and wandered back to my car. Glancing back as I walked, I could see Candy fluttering around him still seeking some sort of real attention. Raymond continued to puzzle me. I considered that our whole time there, he hadn’t kissed Candy once. He didn’t even give her the traditional Aloha kiss. He didn’t hold her hand or put his arm around her waist. He did not do anything that would have indicated that he had any interest in her at all, let alone the interest of a fiancé or soulmate.

Barely two minutes passed when Candy came skipping toward the car, ready to go.

“I’m surprised that you aren’t staying behind,” I said.

“Oh, we would never do that, silly! I just had a few questions about the wedding reception. I have to work tomorrow.”

That was a good enough reason for me, though it didn’t seem to be true. We buckled ourselves in and I surfed over the gravel, skidded onto the pavement and raced my way toward town. We had made it most of the way back in silence until, I finally broke it.

“I noticed that he’s a lot older than you, Candy.” I said as diplomatically as I knew how.

“When you talked about Heather’s age difference with her fiancé you said, ‘I really can’t see how an age difference will affect them if they have a good relationship.’” Candy retorted as though she was quite ready for what I would say.

She had recalled my quote from a couple of days previous; word for word. I suppose that her acting and singing experience must have given her an improved memory for recalling dialogue. I wished I could do that. It had been a long day and I had no time desire to press Candy for more information about this incredulous and seemingly cold relationship.

I dropped Candy at her home, glided carefully past the ever-watchful Waikiki police and into town to pick up Svetlana and her mother for a nightcap at Le Baron Noir. I wanted to see the Baron more than I didn’t want to see Angelica, and thought that a pleasant evening might be in store. Svetlana and Angelica were ready at the door when I arrived and we were tipping glasses of wine in no time.

We had actually barely sat down before Angelica started, “Tell me about this man, this fiancé to Candy. Tell me about him.”

With carefully chosen words I drew the picture of this old farmhand with a broken down truck. Both women followed the story with what seemed to be a mixture of delight and disbelief. I continued to tell them about Raymond’s seemingly indifferent, if not cold, attitude toward her.

“How can this be? How is it possible? This is not human!” Angelica insisted as the wine started to take effect.

Every nuance of the story inspired conjecture and speculation. The women sometimes would have to switch back to Macedonian, lacking the English words to express their more wild speculations. They asked me if I thought it might be an arranged marriage or if Raymond was a widower and gave lots of money to the church in exchange for Candy.

Each glass of wine made their speculations more outlandish. I specifically left out what I felt was the important part of the story, the Lord’s Prayer and Raymond’s knowing gaze. Their speculations were meaningless without that part. I answered what questions I could and united in laughter, the ladies speculated until The Baron was closed.

When we arrived home, I found myself not wanting to go to bed; tired though I was. Something had reminded me that I was in store for a serious nightmare however sleep came for me as it did every night. I hoped this night would not be the one that I had begun to dread.

Monday, August 2, 2010

In Christian lore, there are two kinds of sin, mortal sin and venial sin. If you happen to commit the former type of sin, you are screwed. Mortal sins are unforgivable by gods, people and in my case, wives and mothers-in-law. Venial sins are the class of forgivable sins. So long as the gods, your neighbours and possibly your wife will give you time to repent, almost any venial sin can be washed away and your soul made pure.

In the middle ages, the Catholic Church took the cleansing of venial sins very seriously. They even went so far as to create a whole new imaginary place called Purgatory for just such a purpose. They went even further by selling indulgences to the living and prayer services for the dead to help the faithful manage their way through this dark and terrible place with the least trouble possible. One day, to the delight of many, a plucky young poet named Virgil wrote many cantos describing the place in great detail.

As you can imagine, purgatory is an awful place. It consists basically a remote mountain sticking out of the opposite end of the earth with sinners clinging to it on all sides. Every inhabitant is a sinner undergoing some sort of dreadfully painful atonement for their sins. The lucky ones, who are assisted through prayer (and money) by anyone who hasn’t yet joined them in Purgatory, are able to skip the punishment lines, escape their awful fate and start enjoying the good life. After reading Dante’s book, it seemed to me that Purgatory is in almost every way, exactly like the State of Hawaii.

I woke that morning feeling good. It was an incredible contrast to the day before. I didn’t hurt. I had a skip in my step. I even caught myself singing “The Mayor of Bayswater” in the shower. As I showered, I imagined singing it for an American Idol audition. Simon might not have sent me to Hollywood, I reasoned, but I was certain that he would have liked it. I hummed it through my morning shave and through the application of hair gel and cologne, finishing it off in my best baritone, “And the hair from her dicky-di-do hung down to her knees.”

The applause in the bathroom roared. It was just me whispering an excited “Ahhhhhhhh!” to myself, which expertly mimicked the sound of about a thousand screaming fans.

I considered the contrast of my very on-pitch singing today (having done each of the three harmony parts in turn) to the horrifying noises that I must have made in the bathroom only yesterday. The women, had they were awake for both performances, could have concluded that I was quite insane. Today, I was ready for anything. Hell was behind me and Purgatory lay ahead and Dante taught me that if anything, Purgatory is doable. There was only one mountain to climb and I had been freshly laid. There is something miraculous about being well bedded; it makes a man feel that he can do anything.

I kissed the still sleeping Svetlana goodbye and whispered. “Je t'aime, mon chou,” into her ear. She didn’t rouse, but smiled as she always did. With a kick in my step, I headed out the door to the office, but not before perusing my bookcase. It was obvious. Dante’s Purgatory was begging to be re-read. It was so coincidentally apropos that had it been lying next to a copy of “How to Get Rid of a Mother-in-Law,” I would have still chosen it. Surely Dante and his trusty guide Virgil would quickly lead me out of my own personal Purgatory.

I was still singing when I arrived at the office. After about an hour of work, I’d punched enough keys on the keyboard to meet or exceed the efforts of the past 5 weeks. I let the CEO know that there would be a showing of new software on Wednesday; a software engineer must release new things from time to time to stay relevant. I started into my new book and by the end of the first canto was ready to call Candy.

“Hi,” she said sullenly.

“Hi?” Was all I could think to say. Her familiar exuberance was gone. It made things grayer than the vog.

“Coffee time! My treat!” I chirped, to put some excitement back into the air.

I was aware, having said this, that since I had known Candy, it was always my treat.

Candy agreed to meet at our usual Starbucks, the one closest to her job. When I got to the register to order her special frappuccino had already been made. She phoned ahead. I took our drinks into the spot with the comfy chairs and found Candy sitting there waiting. She was wearing a very pouty face.

“Whatever is the matter, my dear?” I said in a consoling voice.

“I felt like you were ignoring me yesterday.”

Really? I’d taken her driving for hours, walked on the beach, unloaded my problems and… Her pouty look continued to sear holes through my retinas. I had to try and imagine exactly when I had possibly ignored her. I couldn’t think of a moment.

“I’m sorry, baby. I didn’t mean to ignore you. I was really in the most terrible mood yesterday. I’m a lot better now. It won’t happen again.”

“It just felt like you were only interested in Heather and it was all about her and you didn’t seem to care about anything that I had to say.” She scolded.

That was true. I suppose that I had imagined that she was also interested in Heather’s story. I imagined that had I not been there they would have carried along famously without me, but I suppose I was wrong about that. I decided it best to cling to the apology I’d already made.

“Oh, Candy. I was just feeling a little down. That’s all. You have my full attention now!” I offered.

“Good!” She said as the light returned to her eyes. “Now promise me that you will never do that again.”

“I promise.” I said, not really being sure of what I was promising, but my pledge had melted the pout from Candy’s face and that was all that mattered at this moment.

Thinking back to everything that was said on the previous day, I suddenly remembered Candy’s bombshell. She had a fiancé; a soulmate no less. From the time I’d know here she had never mentioned anything like this in her life and yesterday she let it slip like it was absolutely nothing.

“So tell me, now that you have my undivided attention. How long have you been engaged to Roland?”

“Raymond,” she corrected hurriedly. “For over a year now.”

“I find it terribly odd that you hadn’t mentioned him before yesterday. Is this relationship more of a fanciful idea of your mother’s as opposed to a romance of your own?”

“Oh no,” she lied. At least I think she was lying. “Raymond and I had a very strong connection when we first met. He has incredibly strong faith in the Lord, and that’s what attracted me to him. He’s a very loving man. He shares The Word on a Christian radio station three nights a week. We should listen to his show together. Also, as you know, he has this beautiful horse ranch in Waimonalo where Heather’s wedding reception will be. We could even go out there to ride if you want to.”

“So why didn’t you mention him before? Does he know about me?”

“Oh, silly! Everyone knows about you. It’s just that we have had so much else to talk about that I didn’t think that Raymond would fit into the conversation. You and I are always in such a rush.”

I had heard lies before and I was hearing one right at this moment. There is no way that a fiancé can slip your mind any more than a sighting of the Loch Ness monster. My angel’s glow softened. She was less angelic to me now. She had a personal agenda and would not stop at lying to conceal it.

“So have you set a date to marry him?” I asked. The truly engaged always have a date set.

“Well, his mother is not well and between that and his radio show, it seems like I only see him at church these days. I think we will start planning things once his mother is better.”

“Well now that Roland is now an open topic for conversation, I suppose that it’s time for me to meet him. Don’t you think?”

Candy looked up and to the left for the first time since I’d known her. She schemed. “Yes, let’s meet him tonight. We can listen to his radio show while we drive out to the ranch. Then you can hear him, meet him and get to know him, finally!”

My evening was planned. I had a brief flash of worry that I had better tend to my marriage this evening rather than sleuth Candy’s story, but the worry subsided. Candy presented me with the back of her jaw for a goodbye kiss and she skipped off to work. I was still in a pretty good mood from the previous evening’s activity and thought I could rather use a drink of some sort to slow down my mind and better contemplate my situation. Despite the truce with my mother-in-law, I still had a situation that needed tender care in handling.

The feeling of being in Purgatory was ever present. I should qualify that. In the middle ages, purgatory was thought of as a real place. I’m sure that if Dante had been to Hawaii, his Purgatory would have consisted of Oahu and a half-dozen increasingly more boring islands. Modern Catholics will tell you that Purgatory is not a place at all, however, but rather a process where one is cleansed of their sins to better prepare themselves for a perfect and eternal afterlife.

In Dante’s time, it was theorized that it would take a ridiculously long period of time to purge each individual sin; a period of hundreds or thousands of times longer than it originally took to commit the sin in question. I decided that I would not have that kind of time to devote to atonement and look to methods where I could purge my sins fast.

But what were my sins exactly? People commit sins of various magnitude all the time, from white lies to surfing the internet on company time, the latter of which would keep me in Purgatory for a very, very, very long time. So far, my life had been following in Dante’s footsteps, so I thought about the seven deadly sins. Those are the lot of possibly forgivable or venial sins of a cardinal or really bad nature. Cardinal sins, if practiced enough can become quite unforgivable. I calculated that one of the Cardinal sins was likely to be my curse.

I ruled out gluttony right away. Though I had a penchant for good food and champagne, I was neither overweight, nor an alcoholic. Avarice was not my problem either, since no amount of money would exceed Svetlana’s ability to spend it. Sloth was right out, I worked day and night. There wasn’t much wrath in me. Envy; I thought for a minute about envy. After a good long think, I couldn’t come up with a single person on Oahu that I envied. That left lust. Was I lustful? I had a beautiful wife and a bevy of very good looking women friends. I didn’t lust after any of them.

I counted the list, again. I only counted six. There was a sin missing. What was it? Pride; oh fuck, it had to be pride. As soon as I had said it in my mind, I knew it was the obvious answer. All of the grief that I had suffered at this point my life could be traced back a single cause and that was my pride.

I did have a beautiful wife and a bevy of very good looking women friends. I had a cool car and a luxury apartment. I was a long time resident of enviable State of Hawaii. All of these aspects of my life fed my pride and the price of keeping these things was dear. I allowed myself to suffer for each and every thing that fed my pride. I suffered at the hands of the banks, the Immigration and Naturalization Services, my clients-come employers, my landlord, the credit card companies, my wife, my mother-in-law. Everyone who could make me suffer did and I had endured it all for the sake of my pride.

Then the real problem struck me like lightning. Had I committed any of the other seven deadlies, I would have been fine. I could have easily renounced those varieties of sin and began my penance immediately, but how could I part with my pride? How could I even mitigate it? My whole life up to this point had been an approval-seeking process with the spoils of my various successes piled up to reinforce my pride. My pride was everything. It was my soul.

I had never even considered pride as a sin before, at least not my pride. Yes, I had read Dante and Thomas Aquinas and I knew it was big on the list of deadly sins. I’ve even mocked the list, citing that the seven deadly sins are necessary for the survival of the human race. For the first time in my life, I saw that pride had been deadly for me. What was worse is that I would not be able to atone for this sin easily, if I could atone for it at all. I could not shake away the stains left by beautiful women, cool cars and an exotic lifestyle without a complete overhaul of my life.

It was too much to think about. The irony that a sworn atheist was being wracked by a cardinal sin was staggering enough, but there was more. This was happening while I was trapped in Purgatory and responsible for the care of an angel. They symbolism, real or imagined, was more than a sane mind could bear. At once, I knew what was coming for me in my dreams. A combination of fear and anger caused me to clench my fists in disbelief.

“I will not suffer this!” I swore aloud to an empty sky.

Passersby must have thought me crazy, but I was not far from Hotel Street where crazy is normal. I paid no mind to a gawking woman who blocked my way and made an awkward detour around her and returned to work, fists still clenched. I knew my nightmare would return and that I would not be able to stop it. That was certain.

There was no way that I was going to be able to work. I picked up Dante’s Purgatory again and scanned through another few cantos. I hoped that maybe there were clues in it that would help me in what I knew was going to be a difficult time. I didn’t have to read far. The first terrace in Dante’s Purgatory deals with the proud. There, humility is both the punishment and cure for pride. It was my least favourite emotion and perhaps my most often suffered one. I knew at once that I would suffer a great deal more.

I swore aloud and whipped the book across my desk. It hit the wall with a resounding thud. I wished I hadn’t thrown it. A co-worker or two had seen that. Now my co-workers would pass around the fact that had become crazy. It was time to go home. Beast or no beast at home, I was no good to anyone at the office.

After a brisk walk home I arrived to find a happy pair. Mother and daughter working away in the kitchen, chatting up a storm in their crazy Macedonian tongue. They talked and talked and talked and I could not fathom how it was possible that there was a subject left on earth for them to still be talking about. Svetlana kissed me happily and showed me the treats that she had been preparing for dinner. No one questioned why I was home so early and I did not volunteer an explanation.

I poured myself a very large glass of wine and bade that we change the language of conversation to English. After a bit of chit-chat it was evident that Svetlana was genuinely happy and Angelica seemed to be genuinely lacking her normal look of contempt for me.

“So, you ladies are not going to believe this,” I said temptingly.

“What? What? What?” The women begged.

“Candy has invited me out to a ranch this evening to visit with…”

Both women licked their lips in anticipation.

“…her fiancé!”

“No no, this is not possible,” said Angelica authoritatively. “When would she have time to meet a man when she sees you every day?”

It was a dig, but a light one. I took it in stride. “I’m telling you. She had a fiancé all along. Apparently, he has a sick mother or something and she hasn’t seen much of him since she met us, or so she says, because he has not had time for her.”

“I can’t believe this,” Angelica added.

“It’s true!” I exclaimed. “I can take a picture if you like, but I am supposed to drive Candy out to meet him after dinner. We can all go out after that and I’ll tell you the whole story. I’m not going in to work tomorrow so I can let my hair down a little tonight.”

I was already well on my way to relinquishing any pride I might have fostering regarding my employment situation. We chatted until dinnertime speculating on what sort of fellow might have captured Candy’s heart. The speculation continued through dinner with each aspect of the fiancé story being weighed and measured. We wondered how he had courted Candy. We wondered how he asked her to marry him. We wondered if he asked her, or if she asked him or if her mother had set it all up or if anyone had asked anyone.

When dinner was done, Svetlana was practically pushing me out the door to go and fetch the answers to our many speculations. It was quite the opposite scene from the one where I expected to be begging forgiveness for offering Candy a ride. Sometimes Purgatory is simply elegant in its simplicity. I bade the women farewell and raced to my car like a superhero to his secret stash of super stuff.

I arrived at Candy’s at 7pm on the dot, just like we had planned. I called up. She said that she was going to be a few minutes and I punched the radio button for what I expected to be about a five song wait. Only a half a song had gone past when I spotted Candy racing toward the car.

“Hurry! Turn on the radio to AM 777!” Candy shouted as she buckled herself in.

I didn’t even know if I had an AM radio setting. After a minute of fussing with the controls, we were listening to the unmistakable sounds of Christian talk radio. It was going to be a long drive. Raymond seemed pleasant enough on the radio, like a father giving advice to kids one moment and quietly agreeing with the crazy callers the next. It was funny. The callers could say nearly anything and Raymond would listen patiently, quietly agree and go to the next caller.

Near the end of the show we were getting past Hanauma Bay, which is one of the most breathtaking bits of road on the island. I tuned out to look at the waves and the rocks and…

“I’m going to close the show with the Lord’s Prayer,” said Raymond in his consoling radio voice. “This is a very beautiful version of the prayer that you don’t hear very often and I thought it would be nice to close the show with it today. It was written by one Dante Alighieri in the early 1400’s.”

“Oh! Fourteenth century, dude. It was written in the early 1300’s.” I blurted out.

I turned sharply, making all four tires on my car squeal, a difficult and scary thing to do. Raymond’s mistake had probably saved both of our lives. When he announced that he was going to end with Dante’s version of the Lord’s Prayer, I wondered what the chances were that I had been reading this same prayer only this morning. Dante had associated this very prayer with humility and it was therefore a remedy for pride. My disbelief had caused me to forget that I was driving to contemplate the odds that I was hearing this prayer for a second time in one day. It nearly caused me to drive us both off of a cliff.

Raymond read on,

“Our Father, You who dwell within the heavens
but are not circumscribed by them out of
Your greater love for Your first works above,

Praised be Your name and Your omnipotence,
by every creature, just as it is seemly
to offer thanks to Your sweet effluence…”

There was more of course and as Raymond read, I could tell that Candy had developed tears in her eyes. I concluded that even a non-Christian would have to concede that this was a very beautiful set of verses even after being translated from Italian.

“Well, we’ve heard his show,” I said. “Will he be as entertaining in person?”

Candy didn’t answer. She was weeping.

“What’s the matter baby?” I said in my softest possible voice.

“Oh, it is just so beautiful. Sometimes the Spirit just takes me and goes all through me when I hear so much devotion and such beauty. Wasn’t that a beautiful poem at the end?”

I nodded in agreement and reached over to stroke her shoulder to console her. It was a brief consolation as I immediately had to downshift while we careened through another tight corner. The stage was set. A crying angel and an on-air preacher were going to show me how much they love they had for each other. I had no idea what to expect, having never hoped to see anything like this in my life.

The ranch was not too much farther down the road. I arrived at the same time as a beat up old Ford pickup. It was a red and white affair that had long since lost its looks to rust. I expected that it must have been Raymond at the helm, returning from his radio show. No combination of my brain cells would permit me to picture Candy in such a vehicle. He owned a ranch after all; this couldn’t have been his only vehicle.

I pulled up next to the old Ford and ground to a halt in the gravel driveway. The Porsche had very wide tires and wasn’t comfortable on gravel. It seemed an awkward thing, parking next to a farm vehicle. It was the first time I had felt strange in it since I bought the car. When the truck door opened, a man clearly in his 50’s got out. He had curly dark hair and deep set dark eyes and the facial lines of a man who has shouldered many worries. His countenance reminded me of an old farmhand who had seen better days.

“Rayyyyyyyyyyymond!” Candy squealed as she skipped through the gravel and into the older man’s arms.

In the English language there are many synonyms for disbelief, but none that really properly describe the sensation of being completely unable to believe something. Having had a day filled with unbelievable things and having used the word disbelief already several times on this day, I found myself feeling loathe to use it again. When Candy leapt into the arms of this old cowpoke, however, my brain was so utterly shocked with disbelief that feared that I’d be struck dumb. After the embrace, Candy led him toward me.

“Oh I’ve heard a lot about you,” Raymond said with a smile. “It’s good to know that you are keeping Candy out of trouble.”

“Oh thank you!” I said, trying to gain my composure. I didn’t know anything about him. What could I possibly say? “It’s a nice place you have out here.”

Raymond didn’t answer in a real sort of way. He just tipped his head and gave a little laugh. With a nod here and a gesture there, Raymond directed us up to his house. He had a picnic table in the back and brought out a bottle of wine and three glasses. He clearly lived there alone and I could see that Candy would have difficulty visiting him without a car. I didn’t see any vehicles other than the rusty old Ford truck. I could see that vehicles alone might have throttled Candy’s relationship with him. I opened the conversation with a question.

“We listened to your radio show on the way out. I wondered where you got the idea to finish your show with Dante’s version of the Lord’s Prayer.”

“Oh, I like to mix things up and show people new things and old things when I can. Did you like that version of the prayer?”

“I liked it very much,” I confessed. “I was quite astonished to hear it, to be honest.”

“Robyn said you got the year wrong,” Candy chirped as a red hue filled my cheeks.

Oh, why did she say that? Here was more disbelief for my day. “Oh, sorry about that,” I floundered. “I just remarked that it was written in the early 1300’s… while we were driving off a cliff, so I might have overstated how I felt about the mistake.”

From that moment all the conversation was awkward and stilted. Raymond kept very quiet and was visibly tired. Candy continued to shower him with affection to which he paid absolutely no notice whatsoever. I considered that our whole time there, he hadn’t kissed her once. He didn’t even give her the traditional Aloha kiss. He didn’t hold her hand or grab her waist. He did not do anything that would have indicated that he had any interest in her at all, let alone the interest of a fiancé or soulmate.

A few comments were made about the upcoming wedding reception and after playing out that topic, we ended the meeting cordially. Candy escorted Raymond into the house and was out a moment later. We drove most of the way in silence until, I finally broke it.

“I noticed that he’s a lot older than you, Candy.” I said in diplomatic tones.

“When you talked about Heather’s age difference with her fiancé you said, ‘I really can’t see how an age difference will affect them if they have a good relationship.’” Candy retorted.

She had recalled my quote from days before word for word. I suppose that all her acting and singing experience must have given her an improved memory for such things. It had been a long day and I had no time desire to press Candy for more information about this incredulous relationship.

I dropped Candy at her home and whipped into town to take Svetlana and her mother down to Le Baron Noir for a nightcap. The ladies bristled with delight at every nuance of the story and speculated wildly about the situation. They surmised that it must have been an arranged marriage or that Raymond was a widower and gave lots of money to the church in exchange for Candy. Each glass of wine made the speculations more outlandish.

United in laughter, we speculated wildly until Le Baron was closed. I was not eager to go to sleep that night, but sleep came for me as it did every night. I hoped this night would not be the one that I had begun to dread.